


Conversations Where We Don't Move Our Tongues

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dreaming, John Watson's Blog, M/M, POV John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 21:43:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1914888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And I bury myself here in these not-quite-shadows, watching us breathe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversations Where We Don't Move Our Tongues

[www.johnwatsonblog.co.uk]

[new post]

I had a dream last night. A dream where I was myself but I wasn’t seeing through myself. Instead, I was watching us from the upper corner of the room, my eyes and my consciousness buried amongst the sad strings of cobwebs and the snatches of dark - not quite shadows of anything, but expanses of something to exist in their own right - and I watched myself, watched us, the whole night.

The entire time I was stuck there I was thinking: “Get me out, get me out, let my look out of the window at the nighttime rain glistening on the tarmac like ignored litter, let me look out at the transcendental orange cast over the pavements, let me look anywhere other than us, if only for a second. Anything at all would be less harrowing than this.” But of course, if anyone - even myself - had dragged me away from our sleeping bodies I would have grieved the sight. 

You were curled into my chest, and from my imaginary perch I could feel your bottomless breaths ghosting across my skin. At first we just lay there like the dead do, or perhaps how we will when we are dying. Your cadaverous skin, so blanched it almost looked faded, and then muted even more so by your shock of dark curls. They reminded me of the not-quite-shadows holding me in place. Do you really look like this? Does my subconscious mold you into a series of over extenuated hyperboles so you become nothing more than the alabaster-wrapped, marmoreal man?

Time deviated and became corrupt - as it tends to in dreams - and soon the light of dawn washed in through the gap in the badly-lined curtains, swimming between the rumpled sheets carved over our feet. In the early morning golden I saw your face, creaseless and at ease, mere centimeters from my own. I wanted to reach and to feel the softness of your closed eyelids, the warmth of your temple. But of course, I had no waking body to control. 

I can’t remember who fluttered into cognizance first but our eyes were seeing the other eyes and if I could have done I would have consumed you, knocked you back like vodka shots, cell by cell. I wanted to get myself inexcusably drunk on the taste of your sleep-warm skin. 

In this dream - oh, when the poems we can’t quite translate are woven into cloth we can’t quite touch by our minds and we want to feel the words like water but they just trickle deplorably, miserably through our clenched fists - we spoke without moving our mouths. Lying there in the stillness interspersed by the slow tide of our breathing we communicated like dancers, forgetting our tongues.

“hello” “hello”

“the day is still quite

fresh.”

“i can see what you are thinking you are thinking: ‘i want to bury myself in his lungs’”  
“you’re right”

“i know i’m

always

right when it comes to what you are thinking”

“have you ever heard”

 

 

“have you ever heard the sound the sea makes when nothing is happening except the moon and her distant pull”

“yes it is like the sound of our breathing on this one pillow under our hair”

“except we have no moon”  
“well of course can’t you see the sunlight stretching over us”

 

“like a cat lost and uncaring in a labyrinth of plastic bags”

“!”

“i quite think 

i want

forever to stretch like the sunlight”

“right now”

“right now”

“please please please please (please) please please put my memory somewhere safe”

“pleasepleasepleaseplease”

“i want to kiss you”

“kiss me”

“i want to kiss your mouth”

“kiss my mouth”

“,,,,,,,, but you see nobody can move except heaving the dust motes out of my lungs and into yours”

“why can nobody move

are we older now

older with the dust”

“no i think really we are younger we are younger with every breath of yours”

 

“are we lost 

in a labyrinth”

“plastic bags fill our nostrils and we are drowning now”

“can anyone move at all”

“everyone has become ballerinas and thunderstorms and yellow fireworks”

“so why are our bodies so motionless

we create a tide

remember”

“because he is in the corner

on the ceiling can you see him right there he’s right there watching us”

“i want to kiss you”

“kiss me”

“close your eyes and just”

“i’ll close my eyes and just

forget the sky isn’t here”

 

We slept again - or perhaps it was only the pretence of sleep that kept me watching - and I saw the sleeping bodies because I didn’t want to see the corpses, but I knew they were there. 

Soon the light changed. Golden to white to fluorescent blue. If I closed my eyes far enough I could see the outlines of our skeletons, sedentary and rotting. Our bed became a stainless steel table and our hands barely touched. It was this moment that I realised that we are the dying, we are the already dead, I can’t let him float so far away from my skin, I can’t let him, I can’t let him, I can’t let

The sheets under our bodies became stained with red and wet, and the colour blossomed outwards - away from us - in a rectangle, far too uniform. Someone pulled the bed sheet over us, around us, and we became nothing more than once-people, collateral damage, roadkill. 

And then blackness and nothing and the sound of no one breathing (no one at all) and the taste of his blood filling my mouth. 

After this, I woke up alone with him in his bed and me in mine. 

I shuffled downstairs and brushed my teeth twice. 

stop stop stop stop stopstopstopstopstopstop

I read somewhere that it’s easier to forget (or if not forget, easier to ignore) dreams if you write them down. It’s not.

If only I had been allowed to look out of the window, at the nighttime rain, at the orange flooding my eyes and the pavement.

But now a bloody and ferrous taste sits under my tongue.

 

[delete draft?]

[draft deleted.]


End file.
